Sunday, 29 September 2013

The Janus-faced Nature of the Patriarchal Moral-political Economy

When I wrote in December of last year, after the brutal gang rape
and murder of the woman who came to be signified as “Nirbhaya”, “Amanat” or
“India’s braveheart”, I was angry. The anger now has subsided, or replaced by a
cynicism of sorts. However, in that anger, I'd written that I wouldn't have any
qualms if the courts give a death sentence to the six accused. In a way, I did
anticipate that. However, now that the four accused (the main accused allegedly hanged himself in jail; the other, a juvenile and reportedly the most brutal, will walk away in three years) have been given the death sentence,
there is, I suspect, a deeper malaise, or a sense of unease. And this, let me
clarify, has little to do with the ethics of the death sentence. It has more to
do with the ideology of it.

The verdict itself is
not surprising. “Justice”, we knew, would get served – no matter how
problematic its connotations. The country’s reaction to it, judging by the
response on our TV channels and social media timelines, is veering between
sordid celebration of death, and a cautious criticism of the unethical
institution of the death penalty.

In ways more than
one, the verdict has betrayed the spirit of the Justice Verma commission's
pertinent and timely intervention of interpreting and changing the laws that
deal with rapes and sexual violence in India. Writing for Tehelka, Revathi
Laul argues that if “we must strive for a less barbaric society that produces
fewer brutes, then our impulse to punish must also come from higher, less
barbaric reasoning...not by descending to something that is, by all measures of
modern day jurisprudence, barbaric.”

But
the recent gang rape of a photojournalist in Mumbai in August – and the swift
arrests of the perpetrators (the
incident forced us to reflect back on the Delhi incident), throws us into a
similar quandary. The similarities are striking: the social location of
the victims, and the perpetrators; a decadence of geography, of a city whose
parts are left to ruins; and the moral outrage both cases have
evoked. Therefore, I believe it is time that we ask deeper and more
critical questions concerning the very nature of what I have called the patriarchal
moral-political economy.

Some notes on the patriarchal moral-political
economy

In a previous post, I have attempted to explain what I meant by the
‘patriarchal nation-state’, drawing from the Marxist-Althusserian and
Foucauldian notions of “ideological
state apparatus” and “governmentality”, respectively. However, that term is somewhat
limited in both its scope, despite its theoretical richness, to analyse the
events that have unfolded in the last couple of weeks. Thus, I find recourse to
the term ‘moral-political economy’ more useful.

First of all, the
term moral-political economy entails a wider and more fluid understanding of
networks of power in patriarchal societies. The notion of ‘nation-state’ is
limited by what the term represented. With the moral-political economy, that
scope is somewhat widened. Power is thus conceptualised outside the rigid
binary of genders, and is placed in the intersecting discourses of masculinity,
class, caste, religion, ethnicity, social geography and spatiality, media and
representation, knowledge economies, legality, and a critique of institutions,
to name a few. At the same time, there are certain assumptions that are central
to its formulation.

First, is the fact
that there is no one model of the patriarchal moral-political economy; because
its formulation is deeply invested in culture, history and geography, there are
moral-political economies. Each engenders different cultural
aspects, and yet rests on the fulcrum of hegemony and dominance, and
subsequently, resistance and recalcitrance. Second, is that the moral-political
economy is Janus-faced in nature. The moral-political economy
sustains itself as a hegemonic enterprise; it needs to manufacture conscience
and outrage to legitimate the violence it can inflict on certain bodies – of
both, men and women – that do not conform to it. The idea of “legitimacy” is of
extreme importance here, and is something that I shall deal with later on.
Third, is the category of the masculine. Moral-political economies, much like
political economies, derive their power by investing it in an ideal-specific
category: for socialism, for instance, it would be state, or collective ownership; in
capitalism, it would be profit-motive, private property and a free-market economy. In patriarchal moral-political
economies, I argue, it is the category of the masculine, or more so the dominant
definition of the masculine, which is central in understanding how way power flows, and is configured. The concept of hegemonic masculinity is important in
this regard (more on that later).

And finally, using
the fulcrum of masculinity, exclusion and hegemony, the usage of the term
moral-political economy allows for the conception of power in both,
meta-structures and micro-networks; a power that flows
through the social body and networks, and at the same time, one that is deeply invested the
real and normative structures of the real political-economy.

However, it must be
remembered that since the very structure of the patriarchal moral-political
economy is fluid and diffuse, nothing can be set in stone. It is as historical
as it is contemporary; it constantly shifts, because it needs dynamism to
sustain itself. And, more importantly, it pivots on exclusion; it pivots on the
operation of dominance, and violence against bodies and spaces; the attacks on
each, legitimated by the need to defend or preserve something - be it the
dignity of women, children, nationhood, or so forth (what Iris Young calls the masculinist logic of protection). However, while the term
itself refers to an oppressive system, it also engenders within it the scope
for resistance. That is, in its usage, there lies the possibility of exploring
avenues and strategies where it can be resisted, subverted, if not entirely
thwarted. This idea is indebted to the legacy of feminist and Marxist praxis
and, itself, seeks to formulate a post-feminist and post-Marxist one.

These points,
although incredibly sketchy, are essential in understanding the contemporary
discourse of gender and violence in the country. Not in the least because the
question of violence is very real, and very glaring, but because there is an
ever present danger of public discourse slipping into a space where recourse to
the patriarchal moral-political economy is seen as the only viable option for
safety. The truth could not be any further from that: in fact, it is entirely
the opposite.

Thus, as the events unfold outside Saket Court, the death penalty has acquired immense ideological significance to bolster the legitimacy (of the hegemony) of the patriarchal moral-political economy. What the death penalty – and those in support of it – represents is the Janus-faced nature of the patriarchal moral-political economy. And it is this Janus-faced nature that: a) manufactures and appropriates the so-called 'collective conscience', 'collective outrage' of the people, and b) legitimates violence against the bodies of criminals, not because of the crime they commit, but because who they commit it against; and, finally, c) in doing so, through its various institutions, it creates and reinforces network of hegemony, that defines criminality (transgression), and its (selective, and often brutal) punishment.

While there is more than sufficient evidence to
indicate that death penalties don’t work as deterrent (nor do castrations),
that is not to say that death penalties do not have any effects at all. It is
an existentially warped notion that a sovereign, democratic state, backed by
the will of its people, can mete out judgements in death. As some have put it,
death sentences might offer closure to the families of those affected, but I am
uncertain of the cathartic abilities of the hangman’s noose.

Shuddhabrata
Sengupta's post
on Kafila dissects the
absurdity of the death penalty, and is incredibly relevant to our discussion on
the moral-political economy, and especially since they engender a very
pertinent question about legitimacy of violence. Sengupta argues that the
notion of rarity in "the rarest of the rare" is constructed by means
of a hypothetical sliding scale of refinement and intensification of cruelty.
He further argues that:

The ‘rarest of rare’ argument automatically
devalues the experience of millions of people, because, on the one hand it
upholds the principle of the severest retribution, and on the other hand it
rations out that (flawed) understanding of justice on the basis of the sliding
scale of the ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ horrors of different crimes.

Sengupta's arguments
underscore a very pertinent question about legitimacy of violence. The notion
of rarity also creates a hierarchy of violence that is informed, not
so much by the nature or extent of violence, but by who it is directed against,
how it is directed and to what end.

Guardian's Jason
Burke elucidates on
the multiple factors – urban-rural migration, the economic transformation of
Delhi, the aspirations and failures of those who do migrate, and the rising
decadence of urbanity in Delhi – that came together in brutal coordination, and
intersected that December night.

Burke also argues
that one of the striking elements of the case is the similarity of the
background of the victim and the killers. Burke's systemic critique penetrates
and destabilises many assumptions about the December gang rape-murder, and
about the social etiology of rape (after all, rape in India has been described
as an “epidemic”). The perpetrators, he writes:

“…were thus all representative of a substantial
element of contemporary Indian society. They were semi-skilled and poorly
educated, like so many other products of the country's failing education
systems. They were migrants from the country to the town…There was nothing very
extraordinary about them. Yet within hours they would commit acts that would
prompt outrage across the planet.”

I do think that
Burke’s larger point is a necessary intervention in understanding the operation
of the moral-political economy in the nitty-gritty of urban spaces. However,
for the wider discourse, and for the moral-political economy itself, simplicity
is a very powerful ideological device. And the ideology of the death
penalty seeks to negate this very problematic.

With the Mumbai
Shakti Mills gang rape(s), it might do so again (although its justification of
rarest of the rare will not hold true; partly because the area as a site of
prior crimes; and the victims of those crimes do not have equal access to the
law). What is important in this case, is that the state chooses to act
violently in the name of justice – for women, supposedly. And that’s also
precisely where the patriarchal moral-political economy is Janus-faced.

It constructs
legitimacy for its violence – in the case of death penalty for rape, violence
against the bodies of the perpetrators. It is also important to note that the
perpetrators in both the Delhi and Mumbai gang rapes were men from lower
socioeconomic statuses, and were partially employed and, more importantly,
prone to violence before (the accused in Mumbai have committed rapes in the
very space before). Cordelia Jenkins, too, cautions us against this demonisation
of the rapists. Writing
on the coverage of the Mumbai gang rape, she notes that the problem with the
attitude of dehumanizing is:

“…that it overlooks the fact that the young men who
did this horrific thing are citizens of this country too, although in our
collective anger and shame it is much easier to ignore that, to paint them as
monsters, evil to the core, or outcasts. Like other kinds of terrorists, it’s
hardest to imagine that they could be home-grown.”

In constructing the
identities of the accused – as “footloose migrants”, “north-Indians”,
“Biharis”, “Bangladeshis” – the violence against their bodies is legitimated.
Any claims that the perpetrators might have citizenship are forfeit – more so,
denied to them; they are dehumanised, demonised, and are put on the gibbet for
society’s collective violence (the death penalty backed by sovereign will) to
act on them.

This ideology of the
death penalty – the legitimation of violence through dehumanisation – is, also,
a problem of the meta and micro structures of the moral-political economy that
I mentioned in the beginning of this essay. The court’s verdict, and the “collective
will” it represents, is the operation of the ideology in but one space, and one
form of Janus-faced nature, of the moral-political economy. Informal, normative
institutions that are outside the domain of civil society are as much a part of
it. And that is precisely why I think it is important to place the violence
inflicted by institutions like Khap Panchayats in the same discursive
framework. The “honour killings” perpetrated by the Khap Panchayats, especially
in the state of Haryana, while not directly concerned with rape (I would keep
the rapes of Dalit women by high caste men separately), functions on a similar ideology
of punishing transgression. While many object to the term “honour killing”, I
retain it precisely because it articulates the doublespeak of legitimacy: the very
act of transgressing the normative patriarchal lines of caste, and caste
endogamy, dehumanises the victims, to the extent of family members brutally murdering
them. Thus, in the brutal landscape of gendered violence, the legitimation of
violence and death echoes the sentiments of the legal (and ironically backed by
our structures of governments) death penalty – that it is meant to set a
precedence; in both cases, the “collective will” is invoked, defended and
preached. Death sentence becomes the necessary evil.

Thus, the
Janus-faced nature of the moral-political economy certainly is not limited to
the (legitimated) violence enacted on the bodies of male perpetrators by the
masculine state; it includes the bodies of all those who dare transgress the
notion of legality and normativity (for instance, of caste endogamy). The
problem of the masculine, thus, is central to the understanding of the
patriarchal moral-political economy, for which we must take recourse to
understanding the problematic of masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity, masculinist protection &
gendered violence

The intersection of gender, space, social and
economic capital, and violence articulate a network of hegemony, that is best
articulated by the notion of hegemonic
masculinity, and by its
extension, the logic of masculinist protection. The definition of the concept
of hegemonic masculinity offered by R.W. Connell is:

“The ability to impose a particular definition on
other kinds of masculinity… [it is] rather, a question of how particular groups
of men inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and
reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance.”

Connell also states that there is a necessity to
recognise the complex interplay of between gender, race and class. ‘Hegemonic
masculinity’, thus, “is not a fixed character type…it is rather the masculinity
that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a
position always contestable.”

The merit of this
concept is in the formulation of a theoretical framework that states that the
relationships within genders are centred on, and can be explained by, the
relationships between genders. The idea of hegemonic masculinity, when
looked at from the wider perspective of the patriarchal moral-political economy,
allows us to see the multiple, intersecting (and problematic) lines of justice
and injustice in the terrain of rape and sexual violence against women in
India.

The power entailed in hegemonic masculinity, then,
allows rapists to display both, a sense of impunity – that they destroy the
personhood of the victim, robbing them of agency, and thus, of dissent, too;
and, a sense of entitlement – that by the virtue of them being men, they can
lay claim to the bodies of those the weaker sex (but not always, female). These
two ideas are inextricably linked in patriarchal moral-political economies. The
death penalty, in this case, is an extension of that logic of punishment. The
punishment given to the accused (in the Delhi gang rape-murder, and the Shakti
Mills gang rape), then, can be seen as one for them transgressing their spaces,
and perhaps, less for the crimes they committed.

The revelations
about the prior
rapes committed by the perpetrators in the Shakti Mills compound, too, speak volumes about how the moral-political
economy operates. The photojournalist was not the first one assaulted there.
The other victims – a rag picker, a sex-worker and a transgender – were raped
there before. But their complaints were not registered by the police; in fact,
some of them were insulted by cops. The same can be said about the countless
rapes of Dalit women in Haryana, or women like Manorama, who were raped by the
Armed Forces. It is because, in the moral-political economy, the bodies of its
victims do not warrant protection from (and against) the state and other
normative institutions of governance; because they are, in a tragic case of
irony – like the accused in urban India – not seen as citizens, let alone
“India’s daughters”; the violence against their bodies – irrespective of who
inflicts it – is erased, and they exist only as that: bodies that lack agency,
or autonomy (although their struggles are very real, political, and at times,
ameliorative). Their erasure from the discourse of the moral-political economy
allows them to exist as epitaphs, for polemics such as the one I write; they
exist as motifs, which we use to criticise the state, patriarchy, and so forth;
nothing more and, unfortunately, nothing less.

At the same time,
rape engenders the very same patriarchal moral-political economy’s attempts to
crush dissent, and manufacture legitimacy for, and from, it. People who very
rightly raise the question of justice in the numerous rape cases by the Indian
armed forces in the North East, legitimated by the Armed Forces Special Powers
Act (AFSPA), miss out the insidious operation of the ideology of rape (and its
punishment): the difference that is drawn between rape-as-punishable-by-death,
and rape-as-punishment. This contradiction is at the heart of the Janus-faced
nature of patriarchal moral-political economies.

Acknowledgments:
There are a number of people I would like to thank,
who in many ways helped me build and defend the arguments I present in this post.
First of all, a big thanks to Vaishali J, Ketaki Haté, Malathi Jogi, and Vivien
D’costa, for their suggestions and comments on the older draft; to Nolina Minj,
for her constant support, encouragement, motivation and love. And, to Shubhra
Rishi, for the sustained discussions that have now spanned months.

9 comments:

As always, I'm left with raging confusion despite (as much as possible) a close reading. Somethings I'm confused with, so let me spell them out: I don't quite get what masculinity means in the post above, and more importantly how it is so important in the cases mentioned and for patriarchy as a whole. Also, I don't know if the example of the December gang-rape can be banked upon as indicative of the broad reality of patriarchy and how we respond to it. As a personal admission, my response to this essay comes from a less definitional approach to these things.

It's telling that the boyfriend of the Dec 16 victim pretty much did the things which we swore on our heads to do two days after: protect our women, defend our sense of honour, and so on. As some campaigns put it, "be a mard" or whatever that bullshit is. In fact, he did a lot more: he pleaded fellow humans, many of them representatives of law, for help in the most dire of circumstances. But he was asked to stay in the shadow; don't come out, you're a speck on our moral integrity, you put doubts upon the victim's character, and hence upon terms of our support. The interesting difference was that for him it was the obvious thing to do. For us, two days later, it was hero-giri. The obvious thing would have been to put pressure on the state, and otherwise come up with some proper plan. Verma Committee Recommendations were such a plan, but with a little bit of help from the state and, surprisingly the media, we've put it to our recycle bins. The question relevant to you here is, can we imagine any notion of masculinity that will take the day and the night as the one more triumphant than any other notion? My guess is that patriarchy oppresses men with as much brutality as it does other genders. So I'm not comfortable with any inductions about some kind of well-formed idea of masculinity, etc.

I understand your frustration about masculinity. Admittedly, its usage seems premature because I am developing that notion further in a follow up essay. One aspect of it that I regrettably did not explain in depth is what Young calls masculinist protection, i.e., the replication of the patriarch's governance in the discourse of the state, its institutions, legality, war and so forth. And yes, patriarchy does oppress men as much, if not more, and in more insidious ways (my dissertation was on the same topic). And that's why a concept such as hegemonic masculinity is important because it also looks at the intersection between race, caste, religion and gender.And I am glad you asked that question about masculinity because it really underwrites a personal struggle - something I tentatively call 'masculinist politics', as opposed to 'feminist politics'. Prematurely, again, my response would be there cannot be. Which, really, is a point for reinstating (post)feminist criticism in public discourse.Hope I clarified things.

The second thing I'm iffy about is the rather cynical drift that the movement around the dec gangrape that this article takes. You seem to suggest (if I'm not wrong) that the moral-political economic-hegemony becomes the only repository of our response/reaction to patriarchal violence. I find this too cynical. Even for those disappointed by the turn the dec 16 movement took, there was an unmistakable voice that spoke for issues that call for employment for women in public spaces, freedom to study, freedom of choice, etc. This strand impressively precipitated in the verma recommendations, which aren't trivial. We shouldn't give in to drudge-mentality and bemoan that we haven't emerged victorious, but accept what has come out of it. This point is also relevant in another context: while making the valid point that rapes of dalits or tribals by upper castes or army do not appeal to our conscience and our institutions as much as such sporadic cases do, activists somehow demonize as hegemony our (no doubt biased) reactions to these sporadic cases. It's somewhat of a failure on part of these proponents to accept the fact that movements are shaped by very determined forces; what is interesting is that the dec 16 and follow-up protests held participation from kashmiris and caste-rights advocates, and verma recommendations have spoken explicitly about custodial rape, esp wrt afspa, caste, etc.

Another objection I'd raise is this: I think it is unfair to club together the state and khap panchayats together on the mere basis of their punishing transgression (you could then add antivirus software and anti-biotics to the same group!). The crucial difference between the two I think is their goals: the former is a liberal democratic institution with a set of prerogatives, while the latter is not. It's interesting to think of the problem at hand from the perspective of these varied institutions: the state must ensure that popular discontent doesn't take proportions dangerous to it; in this also lie interests of the media and some other institutions. But they must do this strictly using/modifying the guidelines they are provided as liberal democratic institutions. It's a different problem that the what comes out as practice is so fucking different! But the khaps are mafiosi with social prestige. They have not been held responsible for the crimes that most know (and that they would like others to know) they commit. Ever heard of dalit it is importantkhaps? It's helpful to know this difference between the state and khaps for this reason at least: if there is a way forward for gender movements, part of it is to demand the liberal democratic life that we are promised by the state, not only in the face of the state, but also in that of bodies like khap panchayats.

I don't know anymore if this rant above makes any sense. Many more points seemed to arise while reading the article, let's see if some more come out further.

I agree that the Justice Verma committee report was path breaking in that respect, and I do have immense respect for it. But I think that's also what makes the moral-political economy Janus-faced. I avoided saying so explicitly, out of the respect I have for the report, but it remains an inconvenient truth that has to be expressed.

Secondly, I am slightly surprised that, given with your anarchist leanings, you present something of a defence of liberal democratic institutions. Despite my dislike of, and discomfort with, narratives that peg the December 16 incident as a watershed, I do believe it was a watershed moment in the discourse of gender rights, insofar as we witnessed a space for radical politics, that petitioned, criticised, castigated, and tried to work with, the state. However - and perhaps it is too early and I am too wrong - I don't think that faith has been rewarded; least of all with the verdict. For, as I wrote in the post, I have problems with the idea that a sovereign, liberal democratic institution, backed by the will of its people no less, can mete out judgement death. But the discourse surrounding it is, also, important for me, because what it does is it legitimates violence. And the Khap Panchayats, too, work with a similar insidious logic.I club the Khaps and the state's institutions together because I am trying to place them in the discursive frame of legitimate violence - and also, in doing so, I am attempting to explain what I mean when I say that moral-political economies are meta and micro in structures, and why social geography too plays an important role in my analysis.

Liberalism has considerable contribution to the emergence of anarchism. But even forgetting any ideological baggage, I don't see anything contradictory for an anarchist to support the workings of the state if it seems expedient.

Yeah, that forms an interesting problem to look at, the nature of liberalism today. There are at least two interesting aspects to it: its status in capitalist society today compared with that of the 17th and 18th C when it arose, and the exchange it has had with what were once colonized societies, today established as some kind of liberal state. I find it interesting that many tenets of classical liberalism still hold a radical critique of contemporary society (both east and west).

I would like to add on to the discourse by extending your ideas of the moral-political economy to the responses such incidents of rape generate, in terms of increased law regulations, surveillance, urban citizen initiatives and food for the media.

It's interesting how neo-liberal economics penetrates into gendered violence by exhorting the consumption and use of surveillance devices ranging from pepper sprays to CCTV cameras.

Moreover, with the Janus-faced conception that you take up, it's also interesting to look at the sombre responses generated by the rapes committed on foreigners by locals. It is at situations like these, that crime takes on a nationalistic angle to downplay the scene in media representations. However, it will be worth a watch to observe how such pseudo-national events get received after this watershed snowball effect of heightened outrage and the contrary vigilance that comes packaged with it.

That's an interesting point, Parth. I briefly explained it as the manufacture of conscience and outrage that the media and culture industries engage in; but as Pratik noted, it does serve its purpose for the broad gender movement. But, at the same time, it has several problems, and all of them warrant a critical analysis.

See an older post dealing with the same: http://thepositivecynicinc.blogspot.in/2012/07/i-was-filled-with-disgust-when-iheard.html